The boy blushed to the tips of his ears.
“Paul,” he murmured.
But François Bonbonne the proprietor, with his usual keen eye to business, arrived just then and set down before Mealy Benoît the famous hot wine salad of which he had spoken before. Behind Bonbonne came Bouzille, who had left his turnout on the pavement and come down into the supper room to eat and drink his five francs, and more if credit could be got.
Benoît caught sight of Hogshead Geoffroy and immediately offered to clink glasses with him; he pushed a glass towards him, inviting him to dip it with the rest into the steaming bowl; but Geoffroy was warming up under the influence of alcohol, and broke into a sudden flame of wrath at sight of Mealy Benoît. If Benoît should be given the first place, it would be a rank injustice, he reflected, for he, Geoffroy, was most certainly the stronger man. And besides, the sturdy Hogshead was beginning to wonder whether his rival might not have devised an odious plot against him and put the famous piece of orange-peel upon the track, but for which Geoffroy would have won hands down. So Geoffroy, very drunk, offered Benoît, who was no whit more sober, the gross affront of refusing to clink glasses with him!
“Why, it’s you!” exclaimed Bouzille, in ringing tones of such glad surprise that everybody turned round to see whom he was addressing. Julot and Berthe looked with the rest.
“Why, it’s the green man of just now,” said the asylum nurse to her companion, and he assented, moodily enough.
“Yes, it’s him right enough.”
Bouzille took no notice of the attention he had provoked, and did not seem to notice that the green man appeared to be anything but pleased at having been recognised.
“I’ve seen you before, I know,” he went on; “where have I met you?”
The green man did not answer; he affected to be engrossed in a most serious conversation with the friend he had brought with him into the supper room, a shabby individual who carried a guitar. But Bouzille was not to be put off, and suddenly he exclaimed, with perfect indifference to what his neighbours might think:
“I know: you are the tramp who was arrested with me down there in Lot! The day of that murder—you know—the murder of the Marquise de Langrune!”
Bouzille in his excitement had caught the green man by the sleeve, but the green man impatiently shook him off, growling angrily.
“Well, and what about it?”
For some minutes now Hogshead Geoffroy and Mealy Benoît had been exchanging threatening glances. Geoffroy had given voice to his suspicions, and kind friends had not failed to report his words to Benoît. Inflamed with drink as they were, the two men were bound to come to blows before long, and a dull murmur ran through the room heralding the approaching altercation. Berthe, anxious on her brother’s behalf, and a little frightened on her own, did all she could to induce Geoffroy to come away, but even though she promised to pay for any number of drinks elsewhere, he refused to budge from the bench where he was sitting hunched up in a corner.
When at length he got rid of Bouzille and his exasperating garrulity, the green man resumed his conversation with his friend with the guitar.
“It’s rather odd that he hasn’t a trace of accent,” the latter remarked.
“Oh, it’s nothing for a fellow like Gurn to speak French like a Frenchman,” said the green man in a low tone; then he stopped nervously. Ernestine was walking about among the company, chatting to one and another and getting drinks, and he fancied that she was listening to what he said.
But another duologue rose audible in another part of the room.
“If the gentleman would like to show his strength there’s someone ready to take him on.”
Hogshead Geoffroy had thrown down his glove!
Silence fell upon the room. It was Mealy Benoît’s turn to answer. At that precise moment, however, Benoît was draining the salad bowl. He slowly swallowed the last of the red liquid—one can’t do two things at once—laid the bowl down, empty, on the table, and in thundering, dignified tones demanded another, wiped his lips on the back of his sleeve, and turned his huge head towards the corner where Geoffroy was hunched up, saying, “Will the gentleman kindly repeat his last remark?”
Ernestine moved furtively to Julot’s side, and affecting to be interested only in the argument going on between Geoffroy and Benoît, said without looking at him:
“The pale man, with the greenish complexion, said to the man with the guitar, ‘It’s he, all right, because of the burn in the palm of his hand.’ ”
Julot choked back an oath, and instinctively clenched his fist, but Ernestine already had moved on and was huskily chaffing the young man with the budding beard. Julot sat with sombre face and angry eyes, only replying in curt monosyllables to the occasional remarks of his next neighbour, Billy Tom. Marie, the waitress, was passing near him and he signed to her to stop.
“Say, Marie,” he said, nodding towards the window that was behind him, “what does that window open on to?”
The girl thought for a moment.
“On to the cellar,” she said; “this hall is in the basement.”
“And the cellar,” Julot went on; “how do you get out of that?”
“You can’t,” the servant answered; “there’s no door; you have to come through here.”
Momentarily becoming more uneasy, Julot scrutinised the long tunnel of a room at the extreme end of which he was sitting; there was only one means of egress, up the narrow corkscrew staircase leading to the ground-floor, and at the very foot of that staircase was
